Sony: We’ll fix PSP

“Piracy's been the biggest problem, no question about it – it has become a very difficult proposition to be profitable, given the piracy right now.” That’s the frank admission of SCEA’s senior VP of publisher relations Rob Dyer about the current state of the PSP market.

But the exec also claims that, come E3, Sony will have announced a way in which it finally hopes to tackle the issue.

“A lot of the stuff that will be announced at E3 we're very excited about,” he told Gamasutra. “We also believe that there's a way that you will be able to, not stop, but slow down the piracy in the first 30 to 60 days from a tech perspective.

“There's some code that you can embed that we've been helping developers implement in order to get people at least to see a 60-day shelf life before it gets hacked and it shows up on BitTorrent.

“We're going to fix retail. First party has done a great job of getting some campaigns in place to do that. We have some very big third-party titles, notably from Japan. We will have a good line-up this year. And hopefully, by virtue of that, we'll carry through to next year as well.”

Dyer also went on to point out that while the PSP may be struggling in Europe and America, it continues to boss the market in Sony’s homeland.

“It's killing it in Japan,” he added. “In North America you have Peace Walker that I think is going to do very good numbers. You're going to have some phenomenal support from Square. They have some great stuff coming. You have some great stuff from Capcom. Again, it's a lot of stuff from Japan.

“We have EA Sports stuff that's going to be coming out. You're going to have Toy Story 3 on the PSP that's coming out. There are a number of titles from American publishers that will be there, but are we getting full-line support? No. I'm not going to bullshit you on that.”

MCV is the leading trade news and community site for all professionals working within the UK and international video games market. It reaches everyone from store manager to CEO, covering the entire industry. MCV is published by NewBay Media, which specialises in entertainment, leisure and technology markets.